I’m currently developing a horror game. For the killer, the ‘Shade’, I’m using ParticleEmitters for everything other than it’s weapons. They give a really spooky vibe, and it’s exactly what I want, it works perfectly in practice… Except it doesn’t.
The only problem I have with this is that other players seem to crash frequently when playing my game. Once they load in or see the Shade, they crash. The problem is, this isn’t consistent, I’ve never crashed, and worst of all once players have crashed once they don’t seem to crash again. It’s a nightmare.
Here is a quick gif of how my killer looks:
The Particle Emitters are quite intense with short Lifetimes, but this is necessary for the shade’s position to be frequently (I’m not using LockedToPart intentionally). The rate also needs to be fairly high, as there are no bricks. If the rate is any lower, you start to see through the Shade.
Are there any quick solutions that I’m missing? I don’t particularly want to compromise by lowering the rate/lifetime and creating a slightly transparent brick as a body, that’ll take away from the effect. I’ve tested my game disabling particle emitters on the shade and nobody has crashed once. I have a feeling it’s to do with lower end PCs not being able to keep up with the rendering of particle emitters, but if anybody has had experience with this I’d appreciate you sharing.
Your problem is a mass of transparent particles overlapping.
Try setting the transparency and light emission to 0 and using size to manipulate it instead.
I understand what you’ve said, and I’ve tried out your solution. I won’t know if it’ll fix the crashing problem (It probably will) but all I know is that visually it is not as good, the transparency really does bits
Is there something that I’m doing clearly wrong here, or is this just how I’m going to have to have it looking?
Thanks again for the reply. I just wanted to clarify, was the original problem the sheer quantity of transparent particles that were on top of one another, or is it just the fact that there were some in the first place? I’m considering using a mix of the two if the problem was just the sheer quantity.
Is there any documentation or further reading you can point me towards, I have a lot of questions but don’t want to keep replying to this public thread
Just a little tidbit: be mindful of particle rendering limitations. While I don’t necessarily think it’s a factor in this because particles queued over the limit have some dropped (unsure if it drops from new particles or old), there’s a render limit of 16000 particles on PC and 3600 on mobile and Xbox.
